Latex slide agglutination is a rapid test for detection of both clumping factor and Protein A which has been developed for identification of Staphylococcus aureus. Three commercially available products were evaluated using 159 clinical isolates of staphylococci. All three kits showed greater than 90% accuracy (93%, 96% and 97.5%) when compared to the standard tube coagulase test. Using these results we selected the kit which yielded the greatest accuracy for use in the routine identification of staphylococci. The use of this kit enables us to identify Staphylococcus aureus, an important human pathogen, significantly more rapidly than in the past.